At a young age children are told by adults what to eat versus what not to eat. Students are also given sheets in school to help remember healthy foods and to correct their portion size.
This is a great way to teach the youth about healthy eating habits, but it can also lead to slippery slopes of over analyzing and over managing food intake. Students should be aware of healthy foods but also be allowed to eat food without judgment from others or themselves.
Having a healthy relationship with food involves becoming aware of negative food stereotypes in order to be comfortable with food of all kinds. Here are two ways students and staff can form and maintain a healthy relationship with food.
1. Embracing the Food Freedom mentality
Someone having food freedom can be described as the ability to eat food without feeling bad about it. That may be feeling comfortable enough to eat dessert or eat at all. Food freedom is all about confidence and acceptance of the fact that everyone is allowed to eat judgment free. It’s about trusting yourself that you’re making the right choices for you.
2. Disregard weight loss supplements and food shaming content
Here is the unfortunate truth: the goal of most weight loss supplements and “lose weight fast” schemes is to make money, not to help you get healthier. If people are dependent on weight loss pills or single calorie granola bars to feel good about themselves, those companies can count on lifetime customers.
Plus, the worse a person feels about themselves, the worst their relationship with food can become. These weight loss companies often employ some element of food shaming content, which is indirectly meant to keep people down and profit off their insecurities later. A more healthy approach to making good food decisions is to do research about food with no money involved.
Developing an unhealthy relationship with food can manifest itself in multiple ways. One tell-tale behavior is YoYo dieting, which is when people diet for long periods of time, relapse back into old habits, then go back to the diet and continue the cycle. YoYo dieting and emotion-based eating leads to nothing but a bad relationship with food and physical damage.
To keep or start a good relationship with food, people shouldn’t label foods good or bad. According to “8 Strategies for Maintaining a Healthy Relationship With Food” by Ruben Castaneda, labeling foods as good or bad can give unnecessary food superiority, which can lead to more hard then good for the image of food.
We all have to eat food, and there’s so many factors determining the foods people eat that no one has the right to judge people and their choices no matter how different they may be.